Bowstreet Portlets Give Executives Access to OS/400-Based Financial Data

Winholesale Business Services is giving its executives better access to mainframe- and AS/400-based financial data through a WebSphere portal and Bowstreet's Portlet Factory. Winholesale is migrating to a Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) environment, and the capability to rapidly develop role-based views into financial reports, without having deep Java experience, was the differentiating factor in Winholesale's selection of Bowstreet, the software company said. Winholesale executives will be given portlet-based views into various dissections of financial data, giving them a snapshot of the overall health of the organization, and the capability to drill down further to look at regions, territories, and even individual companies. Winholesale Business Services provides IT services to Winholesale, a collection of wholesale distributors of plumbing supplies, industrial equipment, heating and cooling materials, electrical equipment, waterworks supplies, pumps, fasteners, and electronics. Bowstreet delivered support for the iSeries earlier this year (see "Bowstreet Brings 'Portlet Factory' to iSeries").

Wipro Wins Offshoring Contract, Thanks to OS/400 Expertise

OS/400 expertise at a Wipro Technologies service center in Bangalore, India, has resulted in the outsourcing specialists winning a multi-year contract for application maintenance, support, and development from Loyalty Gate, which helps run the loyalty services of three major European airlines. "Wipro's offshore delivery capabilities, its presence in Europe, application support and maintenance in iSeries, and understanding of the airline-related applications during due diligence was very impressive, which eventually proved decisive in selecting Wipro over other suppliers," said Khushnud Irani, who heads operations and IT at Loyalty Gate.

eSP Drops Price of Stay-Linked Radio Frequency Solution

eBusiness Solution Pros is delivering new pricing and licensing options for its Stay-Linked radio frequency terminal emulation software for OS/400-, mainframe-, and Unix-based warehousing operations, the company announced last week. Under the new StarterPack bundle for small and midsized businesses, companies can license a Stay-Linked server license and five end-user licenses for $1,295, a savings of $675 when compared with licensing the server and client components separately, the company says. Additional client licenses are $195 each, and a dual-session licenses is $295. The company is also making available a new "pooled" licensing option for large, distributed enterprises that cannot predict how many workers they will need at multiple distribution centers on any given day.

DYS Analytics Ships New Performance Tools for Domino, Exchange

DYS Analytics last week announced a major new release of its CONTROL! performance measurement and management software for messaging platforms like IBM Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange. CONTROL! is a suite of tools that analyze the Domino and Exchange messaging environments in preparation for server consolidations or migrations, improving bandwidth use and quality of service, planning for capacity upgrades, or any other action through which a customer can benefit from having a greater understanding of its collaboration environments. New capabilities delivered with this release include instant messaging chat logging and alerting, broader e-mail trending analysis, automated user alerting, and an optimized Web interface.

Commerce Bank to Access Fidelity's Banking System Through ASP

Fidelity Information Services announced last week that Commerce Bank, in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, plans to implement its Advanced Commercial Banking System (ACBS) lending system via the application service provider (ASP) delivery model. The $27 billion bank will become the eighth major financial institution in the last 36 months to sign on as an ASP customer, says Dick Levy, president of the ACBS division of Fidelity National Financial's Fidelity Information Services subsidiary. Commerce Bank will use the origination, servicing, and portfolio management modules of the ACBS product. ACBS runs on Windows and OS/400 platforms or can be delivered via ASP; it is licensed by 71 financial institutions.